A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex (45 page)

So I bought a tape measure and gave my measurements. The company made me a replica of Liger’s famous bodysuit, but I didn’t get a chance to see it (never mind try it on) until I arrived in Tokyo the night before the show.

It was basically a skintight white wet suit, made of material thicker than spandex. When I tried it on, it was like wearing a body cast.

When I put on the trademark Liger horned mask, it was like putting on the Gimp’s gear. It had only a little hole for a mouth and the eyes were covered by a red mesh that totally restricted my sight. With my new Super Liger costume on, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, and I felt like I’d been dipped in candle wax.

I would’ve been okay at an S&M convention but how in the hell was I going to wrestle?

Drastic changes were going to be necessary so I went into MacGyver mode and began altering my costume. I took a pair of scissors and cut the chin out of the mask, allowing me to breathe. Then I tried to figure out a way to open up the eyeholes without messing up the red mesh, but it was futile. So I put the mask on and wore it to bed to try and get comfortable with it.

The next day I was taken to the gigantic Tokyo Dome, aka the Big Egg, an intimidating structure that put major perspective on the fact that it was my:

First time wearing a mask.

First time wrestling with New Japan.

First time wrestling in a full bodysuit.

First time in the Tokyo Dome.

When I went to meet with my opponent, Kanemoto, I got the vibe that he didn’t want any part of the match and wasn’t happy about having to put me over. It was a recipe for disaster but I was ready for the challenge and I knew I would persevere. This was my big chance and nothing was going to stop—

Hold on, someone’s at the door.

“Hello?”

“Yes hello, it’s me...the JERICHO CURSE!”

The Super Liger match was a bigger bomb than a Pauly Shore comeback.

I walked to the ring on the football-field-sized walkway and couldn’t see a damn thing the whole time. I had to stare intently at my feet with every step as it was the only way I could keep on the path. Every time I looked up, the red lights that dominated the lighting rig made me feel like I was in the middle of a strobe light rave party. And me without my glowsticks.

I had no peripheral vision, which made even hitting the ropes a challenge. I felt like Wilf from the Hart Brothers Camp.

With the crowd going mild for the match, I tried to get something going. I knocked Kanemoto out of the ring and got ready to do my trademark crowd-pleasing move of jumping straight to the top rope and drop-kicking my opponent off the apron.

But when I went for my big leap, my legs felt like they were painted with concrete. I didn’t even come close to getting my footing and slipped right off the ropes onto my ass inside the ring.

The Dome crowds were notorious for being quiet and it was hard to hear any noise anyway as it dispersed in such an expansive building. But I sure as hell heard the sound of thousands of people laughing at me when I fell. Giggling crowds are the kiss of death in Japan; the Asian equivalent of “You fucked up!”

I ended up winning the match but Super Liger’s fate had been sealed, especially when one of the New Japan employees took my costume “for safekeeping,” the moment I took it off in the locker room.

There was a big party after the show that I had to attend while wearing the Super Liger Party Mask. I might as well have been wearing the Masque of the Red Death. I’d been painted with the scarlet letter and nobody at the party would even look at me, except for my friend Black Cat.

After waiting to work for New Japan for a half dozen years, I’d finally gotten my chance and delivered a barn burner of match...people were burning their barns in protest.

Failure be thy name.

In order to live up to the huge Liger legacy, I needed to put on an A+ performance, but I’d responded with an F-(for Fugettaboutit) abortion instead. Super Liger was hung, drawn, and quartered, never to be seen again. Luckily, I was already contracted to return the following month as Chris Jericho.

When I returned to the States I heard Mark Madden on the WCW Hotline say, “Chris Jericho stinks in his first appearance as Super Liger.” If word of my failure had reached America before I did, Super Liger really must’ve stunk worse than my nuts do. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even wrestle in the Dome. I was attacked and stuffed into a closet and my assailant actually wrestled as Super Liger. Years passed before Kevin Federline would enter a wrestling ring again.

So I went back to New Japan the next month as plain old no-frills Chris Jericho. If my plane ticket and visa hadn’t already been processed, I probably wouldn’t have been brought back under any name. In my first match back I wrestled Takashi Iizuka, who had the reputation of making his opponents look good. I used to have the same reputation, but now New Japan felt I needed all the help I could get.

My confidence was shot once again after the Dome disaster (coming soon to a theater near you) but I still had a decent match with Iizuka. The next night I was in a tag match against the masked Samurai and Jushin Liger himself. While a lot of guys in wrestling can hide their true feelings and be nice to your face even if they don’t like you, Liger isn’t one of them.

He knew I could wrestle from my matches with WAR and that’s why he’d come up with the Super Liger idea in the first place. But my performance at the Dome was miserable and he was furious with me. I’d almost tarnished his legacy and I’m sure he took some flak for suggesting the Super Liger character in the first place.

We discussed our match while an 800-pound Super Liger sat in the corner. I was told in no uncertain terms that Liger was beating me with his finish in the middle of the ring, clean as a sheet. I’m sure that the consensus was to get whatever they could out of me by having me lose to everybody on the roster.

Now I had something to prove and we had an exciting hard-hitting match that the crowd really enjoyed. Liger beat me but it didn’t make any difference because I’d brought Sexy back.

Afterward Liger shook my hand and was clearly pleased. Even more importantly, I ran into the head booker, Riki Choshu, in the backstage hall.

“You Chris Jericho? You same guy as Super Liger?”

“Yes sir,” I said nervously.

“Hmmm,” he pondered while nodding his head. “Chris Jericho very good. Super Liger very bad.”

“I think maybe Super Liger dead,” I replied.

“I think maybe good idea,” Choshu said and shook my hand.

And that’s how I regained my Japanese mojo, baby.

Now that I was back on track, I threw myself into the Japanese style like never before. I’d always been enamored with the whole feel of the Japanese wrestling companies and New Japan was the biggest of them all. We worked in bigger arenas in front of bigger crowds. That also meant that there were a higher class of female fans who had no problem donating to the cause by using their parents’ money to buy me expensive gifts and meals.

Chris Bigalow, Oriental Gigolo.

Being in the big leagues meant that the attitudes and the work rate were more serious as well. Every day I trained with the entire New Japan roster in the arena before the show. We would run laps and work out with the weights that were set up in every venue. I did a Japanese style workout where you took a deck of cards and threw them to the floor one at a time. Then you would do the number of squats (black suits) or push-ups (red suits) listed on each card, with the ace high, in quick succession. Sound easy? Try it, junior.

We did a lot of stretching in the ring, which confirmed my suspicion that Stu’s training regimen we’d followed in Calgary was indeed derived from Japanese techniques. We did one style of back bridges that involved being stretched around a spare tire like a Gumby for minutes at a time and another style where we only used our necks for support. It was thirsty work and everybody did the stretching as a team. The camaraderie was cemented by the tradition of everyone wearing uniform track suits with their last names written on the back like hockey jerseys.

It was traditions like these along with the air of dignity surrounding the sport that made Japan my favorite country to work in. Benoit felt the same way and we were stoked when we found out that we’d been booked on the next tour together.

We were near the end of the fifteen-hour flight from Atlanta to Narita so I started filling out my customs form. I grabbed my passport to check the work visa number and almost threw up when I realized I’d brought the wrong one. Having both an American and a Canadian passport was one of the benefits to being a dual citizen; it was also one of the detriments especially when you are as scatterbrained as your fearless scribe. My visa stamp had gone into my American passport and I had brought my Canadian one instead. I was freaked out that the customs officials would simply send me back to the States. When we landed, I was placed into a holding room with the other dregs of society who had tried to sneak into Japan without the proper documentation and had been detained.

After spending an hour with Borat’s extended family, a customs official rescued me. Since New Japan had such a high profile in the country, the company was able to smooth things out for me. But before I was allowed to go, I had to sign a form that literally said:

I, Chris Irvine, promise to never enter Japan again without the proper visa forms.

I’m surprised I didn’t have to write it 100 times on the blackboard too.

Then they searched my bags for drugs and porno, fast- forwarding through my VHS copy of
Planes, Trains, & Automobiles
looking for boobies and confiscating my
Road House
video when they found some.

Kelly Lynch! Kelly Lynch! YEAHHH Kelly Lynch!

Benoit was one of my best friends, but you wouldn’t have known it on the first night of the tour. When we were booked in a tag team match against each other, he attacked me before the bell and pounded me like a meat tenderizer.

Similar to when he’d slapped me at the J Cup, the attack was like having a bucket of ice water poured over my head. We took out our WCW frustrations by beating the living shit out of each other. During the melee I went for a spin kick and instead of connecting full force, I brushed the side of his face instead. He still took a bump and nobody knew the difference—nobody except him.

After the match I went looking for him but he’d pulled his usual Houdini act and I couldn’t find him anywhere. I finally found him in the corner of a boiler room and asked what was wrong.

“I bumped off that spin kick. You didn’t connect and I never should’ve bumped.”

“Nobody noticed. The match was killer.”

“No, it was a rookie mistake and I never should’ve done it.”

He was a perfectionist and decided that he needed to purge himself by doing 500 hack squats right then and there. I’d thrown the errant kick, so I thought it was only fair to join in on his Opus Dei routine and cleanse myself too.

I hadn’t done a single hack squat since wrestling school, never mind 500. After doing 300 my legs felt like they were going to detach themselves and beat me over the head for being so stupid, so I stopped. I don’t think Chris noticed and he continued squatting with machinelike precision until he reached 500.

My legs were not pleased with their boss and they completely mutinied on me when I woke up the next morning. When I tried to get out of bed I collapsed on the floor while my legs stood beside me snickering. I crawled to the shower and sprayed hot water on my screaming limbs, hoping to reach a truce. They laughed in my face and knotted themselves tighter than Mick Foley. To make matters worse, when I showed up at the arena I found out that I was supposed to wrestle Liger in a championship match for the NJPW junior heavyweight title.

It was my first shot at the title and I was walking like the Tim Conway old man (dated reference). So I secluded myself in the corner and stretched my legs for an hour. I was able to pull off a decent match but I paid dearly the next day when I spent the whole afternoon in bed negotiating with the terrorists that had taken my pins hostage.

My legs went back to work the next night when I was put into a match with the legendary Great Muta. He was one the biggest stars in Japanese wrestling and a seasoned vet who knew all the shortcuts necessary to having a long career in the business.